


Sanction and Apotheosis

by deepandlovelydark



Series: Ecstasy in Cosmogone [11]
Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar, MacGyver (TV 1985)
Genre: Pseudo-History, Research, Seeking Mr Eaten's Name, general Neathy weirdness, present day, queer
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-20
Updated: 2017-11-12
Packaged: 2019-01-20 02:50:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 7,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12423558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deepandlovelydark/pseuds/deepandlovelydark
Summary: In which are sundry academic notes from the Sprightly Angler's commonplace book.In which, also, the Angler's own exploits are chronicled.





	1. Extract from the Lamentable Historian’s introduction to her classic textbook on Seeking, “Burning Marsh-Mired”

**Author's Note:**

> If I'm going to be writing more invented academia about the perspective of future historians on the Neath, I'll need a fic to put it all in. 
> 
> I also need a teller of tales; her name is Lisa, and you may see her in the flesh if you watch the MacGyver episode "Nightmares". As usual, I assume a theoretical reader who is familiar with Fallen London (or at least "Fulgent Engineering") and not at all with MacGyver. There is not very much in canon about Lisa, anyway; but she macgyvers things and Mac arranges for her to get a scholarship, and that's really all I need to build on. So I'll be wandering back and forth between her story and the Neath's, as the mood strikes me. 
> 
> ("Ecstasy" is rather a told-in-pieces series, I'm afraid; but it does have an overall shape to its plot, I can promise that...)
> 
> Copyright notes: Fallen London is © 2015 and ™ Failbetter Games Limited: www.fallenlondon.com. This is an unofficial fan work. MacGyver is owned by Paramount or Lee David Zlotoff, depending.

...nevertheless, the archetypal Karakorum Seeker never made that journey North. The pull was rather to the East; that hiraeth yearning for the traditional ancestral location, which shaped Fourth City culture at a fundamental level. The sense of _displacement_ , of the Neath as violation, alwaysoperated far more potently in Karakorum than any other Fallen City (by way of illustrating the trauma, compare the murder rate during the Fourth City’s first week in the Neath - zero - with that of London, which saw a marked increase over pre-Fall levels). Even beyond the usual shock of Neath-adjustment, there was much to trouble this particular culture in ways that the Bazaar denizens, always interested in the particular rather than the general, failed to foresee. An abrupt, narrow confinement between rock and zee for a people that well remembered the range of two continents, an atmosphere absolutely inhospitable for horses, even the Masters' choice to call themselves Khans, which the populace saw as an outrageous liberty (that they adopted the relatively innocuous "Mr" in the following city suggests even they eventually recognised an error of judgement). Matters would not improve. The dominant narrative in contemporary accounts of the Long Path present it as an escape from Fingerking domination, as indeed it was, but the option for fight was always there. Those refugees who would go on to build the Khanate chose ultimately to emphasize and emulate the peripatetic aspect of their heritage instead (not that their later opponents would observe much reluctance for battle- but that would come from a more self-assured community, and away from the Masters' dominance). 

In a sense, every exile for Khan’s Heart was a Seeker in spirit; eager for new experiences, keen to defy the Bazaar's might, and more than ready to burn the last ties with their native city. Those Mongols who ate for Mr Eaten may have gone against societal norms (those norms shaped by the Masters' indoctrinations), but it was a difference of degree rather than kind. In a sense, the Masters had performed their work entirely too well. After the unruly feasts of the Third City, the deadening silences of the Second, they had finally pruned themselves a city composed only of the docile, fanciful love-dreamers and honey-drinkers...who proved all too susceptible to the call of Parabola. 

Add to these cultural barriers, a merely technical issue: zee-travel to the Avid Horizon. For much of Karakorum’s tenure, the Mongols had no means of voyaging more advanced than the oar-rowed trireme; practical enough for spice-trading with the Elder Continent, ineffectual and unlikely for a solitary voyager’s profitless quest. Then, the Inhospitable Deviant’s electrostatic motor (initially developed for its lighting qualities) revolutionised the Fourth City’s technology, but at exactly the point when the Khanate was demanding every last ship for the common good. One might sacrifice one’s life lightly, sacrifice a horse in times of absolute crisis, but anything so large as a rowboat was to be saved and nurtured for the Long Path. And this self-imposed demand worked far more effectively than any of the Masters’ social engineering. 

So the Fourth City Seeker would instead work their way along the Western Shelf (an arduous journey, but still possible until the Tomb-Colonies closed their borders); and what would they find at the Northern edge? Mysterious Whither, with its friendly if questioning priests, its reassuring promises to cleanse the cannibalistic taint, an inclusive attitude towards gods that would be nostalgically familiar to anyone raised in the Fourth City’s open-minded religiosity. Above all else, they had the Exaltation. Heaven in the Neath for our weary traveller: returning to their Eastern birthright, a light-filled space that might even - who knows? - be hospitable for horses. Those Seekers who did make their way to zee at last did so not for Mr Eaten, but for Salt.


	2. anecdotes regarding a name

_Cambridge, 1992_

There's a faded sticky note on her bedside Teasmade (her own rebuild job, after the last owner contrived to knock their morning cup into the workings): _your name is Lisa Allen._

An identical legend graces a cloth label sewn inside her purse. Another one is taped around the handle of her favourite fishing pole. And every night, she renews the words on her left wrist, tracing the words out in clean black marker. 

Once, she'd allowed Anji to catch her at it. 

"Why write that? Think you'll forget it?"

"You never know," she'd said, applying the last flick over the i. "I always hated my name. My mother told me once they hadn't even picked it out for me, just bought a baby book and opened it up at random."

"It could be worse," her roommate had said, smiling. "The number of Anjis I know...my best friend, two cousins. But Lisa seems like such a pretty name."

"Thanks, I guess." A polite inanity, to be met in kind. She likes playing up to her role as cheerful foreign exchange student; Anji thinks she's just a wacky American with a taste for DIY and 19th century studies, otherwise unremarkable.

Lisa Allen is careful to keep a firm hold on her name.

Otherwise, it'd just be too easy to forget it. 

************************

_Teversham International Airport, autumn 1989_

"So Zoe's back in the States already?" Lisa asks. "Too bad, I was looking forward to seeing her. Could have used some practical tips about archeological fieldwork."

"Uh-huh, she took a direct flight back from France. I think she's going to try to get funding for her brand new dig there, so that'll only take her another couple of years. But I figured I'd take the scenic route back. You know," MacGyver says, hefting a game bag over his shoulder, "we went to London and I didn't even see the Gap?"

"You're kidding, right? It's kind of impossible to miss."

"Nope. Flight to Gatwick and then a bee-line for Chelsea Harbour, Zoe's very precise when she puts her mind to it. But enough about my misadventures. How's college going?"

"Oh, it's great! You were right about recommending that gap year, but now I’m finally here, I'm enjoying it no end. Though...I've changed my mind about my major," she admits, as they step onto the travelator. "It won't be engineering after all, I'm taking history instead."

His face remains a study in quiet. Does she only imagine dismay in his eyes?

Not a bit, if Mac's tone of voice is anything to go by. "But you've got the brains for it, the maths- you were always so excited about engineering! What made you change your mind?"

Here it comes. Her first test as one of Phoenix's own; if she can't lie convincingly to her mentor about the subject they both love like nothing else on earth, how will she ever perform under real pressure? The Great Game isn't for dilettantes. 

"Well, this whole papers and assignments grind...I mean, it's fun, but it's a lot tougher than anything I did back in high school, that barely took any thinking at all. And you have to show your work every time-"

"Best way to learn any subject, teaching it," MacGyver says, as they step off and start making for the exit. "C'mon, haven't I mentioned that?"

"I know, but...I'm taking strength of materials now, and honestly, it isn't any fun. Too much theory, not half enough practice - I mean, I'd hate it if school turned me off engineering for good. So I'd rather take something else for my subject and keep my hobby as a hobby. And this is such a country for history," she says softly. 

"Uh-huh," he says, looking around at the chaos of jumbled Brutalist architecture that greets their entrance into the open air. "That so?"

"Well, not this, obviously, Cambridgeshire is all this weird mix of ancient buildings and post-Fall construction. Hallo," she says, waving at the next available taxi. "We can stop off on the way, there's a terrific cafe across from your hotel where we can get a cream-coffee."

"One of England's famous dark coffees, huh? Like an espresso or something?"

"Sort of, they grind beans over the cup for a finisher. Not done properly unless it's black as night, I'm told."

"Not really my drink...but hey, I'll try anything once."

It's a mistake. When they try it, he chokes on the first sip and struggles to the halfway point before giving up. 

"Allen, do you want to finish this? Think I'll stick to the scones."

He remembered! 

But then, MacGyver of all people would, wouldn't he?

************************

_History Faculty Building, 1990_

Tonight's initiation, for this year's crop of budding historians. A pranking ritual of purely social significance.

(She dearly wants it to mean more than that.)

Two stern, bewigged figures peer down from the judgement seat. Dean and Hartwell look pretty silly, done up in fancy dress like this.

(They are representatives of the Traitor Empress herself. She will respect them.)

"Lisa Allen. You may approach the bench."

She walks up the aisle with calm, measured steps, conscious of her mind trying to record every smallest detail. Afternoon fall of sunlight on dust. Curious, amused faces of her fellow students. Contradictory scents of ancient wooden-backed chairs and modern cleaning chemicals. It stems from a historian's natural instinct, she hopes. 

(She will receive her sacrament in serenity.)

"Understand this, Lisa Allen. On your honour as a historian, you will abandon your name."

Course, she's already signed the nondisclosure agreements that say a dozen different government will track her down as a fugitive and silence her, if she ever breathes a word about her research in the wrong quarters. This is a formality only. 

"You will choose a work-name for all your writings and communications that deal with the Grand Sanction, and everything it entails. You will provide the University with a copy of all such writings and communications, so the lore may be duly recorded. You will never discuss nor hint nor tell any unauthorised persons of such information as is sealed under the protection of the Sanction, were it only your nearest and dearest."

Some have said their new work-name with insouciance, some with pride. A few stumble over it, provoking giggles. It's not a serious occasion. 

"Now. Tell us who you are to be, and so shall we record your name for as long as our histories last."

"The Sprightly Angler." 

(The Sprightly Angler.)

That's all. They nod, write it down, and she begins the walk back to her seat. The other students cheer her. 

"She said it as if she'd been christened with it," she hears Hartwell whisper.

Ha. 

(It's far more important than that.)

************************

_the irrigo archives_

This, now. Here in the past, this is where her future starts. 

She checks her wrists one last time before entering. One name written on the left, one on the right. It's important to keep track of your name, the tutors have told her, because if you lose it while working down here, you might never find your way back. Of course, she intends to be more careful than that. 

The cross of the t looks a little faint. She freshens it up with her marker. 

Her name is Lisa Allen. 

But if she ever does get lost, it's the Sprightly Angler who's going to make it home again. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a two-parter MacGyver story set in what's supposedly Chelsea, "Legend of the Holy Rose".
> 
> I'm fudging the difference as best I can, assuming that this is part of a Tourist!London built to cash in on the Americans. Goodness knows that Albertopolis isn't necessary in Fallen London...


	3. "Meat pies and zee-salt": from the fifth chapter of "Burning Marsh-Mired"

..to the contrary. The Fifth City not only possessed the necessary steam technology for would-be Northern voyagers, but a well-developed naval tradition incumbent upon this inheritance. The idea of London as a seagoing power persisted long after the Fall, one fully justified by the Merchant Navy, if not by the RN’s increasingly perfunctory efforts….

Briefly, then: seeking as its own self-justifying end, hints of cannibalism, and a voyage North. As matters had fallen out, London had already edified a figure who combined these qualities; Sir John Franklin was one of the few heroes of early-reign London to maintain, and even gain in popularity after the Fall. His notoriously tragic expedition in search of the Northwest Passage, Britain's own unheard Cassandra….

Factional opinions varied dramatically. To the Church, Franklin became one of the first “secret saints” in a newly reorganised calendar: a martyr through and through, but one whose graces and sins were not for public airing (those dissidents who argued the contrary eventually broke away to the heretical Chapel of Lights). For the Society set, a previously beloved figure became unmentionable almost overnight; the explorer’s outspoken wife, Lady Franklin, was banished to permanent exile in the Tomb Colonies - so quickly that the relevant documents, in a unique case of royal disfavour, list only her original name. Over the next forty years, Mr Huffam mounted various productions of his cowritten play “The Frozen Deep” whenever Seeking fervour looked to be gaining traction: an indifferent work at best, but one which stolidly denied all suggestions of cannibalism, in favour of propagating a stoutly British tragedy with a simple, uncomplicated ending. 

As for the Dockers? Franklin was a hero, doubtless, a warning certainly: but also, an example. Not surprisingly, zailors became the first Londoners to take up Seeking in earnest…

... _suchenroman_ gained much of its shock value by co-opting London’s most beloved genre, that of autobiography, but warped towards failure rather than the popular narratives of ever-more-constant successes. More than one text deliberately adopted that horatian tone at its start, to be gradually subsumed under much-fetished cannibalism. The self-induced nature of the horror only added to its chill; who, bathed in the promise of Neathy immortality, could seek out such an ending...

After four cities, the Masters had learned well how to deploy the imp of the perverse. Romantic literature was made difficult to obtain, but not impossible. Aside from allowing the Bazaar to take first pick of all love stories - invariable priority -, tantalising Londoners with forbidden fruit was deemed an encouragement. The results of various temperance movements, in or out of the Neath, tend to support their understanding of human nature (consider the short-lived liquor ban of 1878, widely suspected to have been instigated by Mr Wines himself, which resulted in the Mushroom Riots and a suspicious bumper crop the following year)... 

In this light, _suchenroman_ presented a paradox: it could not be forbidden, for fear of encouragement. Yet it also could not be tolerated. Enter, then, the Ministry of Public Decency. Armed with absolute police powers and frequent resort to irrigo…

The Empress' ban on Knife and Candle was another limitation on the growth of Seeking, until London’s late-reign tensions persuaded its reinstatement, as a useful social release valve. No certain record indicates whether its return was one of the Empress’ tools in her cautiously underplayed feints with the Masters (even had the motive existed, it would hardly have been recorded), but the chronology matches...

...are, invariably, incomplete; a _suchenroman_ that ended conclusively would be a self-defeating narrative. And yet, there are records of those who returned, some who went on to fairly successful careers as zailors or Bohemians - one is even said to have become a particularly popular performer at Mahogany Hall! Seven-folders, most dreaded of Londoners, were yet also among the most beloved. Those who had surrendered everything, yet found the call to London too strong to resist at the last, flattered her indeed...

But then, ultimately all records of London are _suchenroman_ : fragmentary and incomplete, even up to the Apotheosis. 

Past that point lies only mystery. 


	4. define: catalyst

_Cambridge, 1996_

This isn't fair. 

She rages with helpless, angry impetuosity: it runs through her blood with creepy familiarity. Unwanted nostalgia trip to over a decade ago, back when she was just a scared teenager wanting out of Inglewood. 

"You can't just ban the whole Neath department! I've spent my entire academic career working for you people, how can you take it away from me now?"

"Miss Allen, we do have that authority," Pete Thornton says gently. He radiates concern and fatherly sympathy. 

What the hell did MacGyver ever see in this guy? What did she?

"So, I'm advising you to get out now. Move on to some other part of the Foundation, while you still have a valid security clearance. You're young, there's plenty of other fields where your expertise could be put to good use."

Allen thinks of the hundreds of thousands of words she's squirreled away about the Five Cities, information that will be utterly useless in any other context. About the half-built Whirring Contraption that she's been slowly finishing, out of stray references and intuition. Of her Lady in the Attic. 

"This is all my fault, isn't it. Because I found that reference to Mac in the records, and was misguided enough to tell you about it. Never would have mentioned it, if I'd known the reaction would be like this."

Pete shakes his head, motions as if to touch her shoulder. When she jerks away, he does stop. 

"You did the right thing, letting me know. But yes, I had to talk it over with the board...they’ve decided enough's enough. The Phoenix Foundation wants everything relating to the Sanction to be on a strictly need-to-know-basis from here on out." He leans back. "Have you ever thought about why the Grand Sanction exists?" 

She's speculated with some of the other students (theories ranging from "scared of their own shadows" to "Phoenix cut a private deal with the Masters" to "everything we're studying is a Whitehall lie, in a long-term experiment to gauge how gullible people can be"). The official version'll be interesting as propaganda, if nothing else. "Go on."

"You know that the Neath provided some type of localised immortality, right?"

"Yeah." So he’s just going to be insultingly obvious, then. That's a constant virtually every text mentions, in varying tones of glee and amazement. 

"Now, that's dangerous enough. Think of the confusion, think of what would happen if people ever really got the idea that immortality exists in one specific place. You know what happens? Goodbye the whole of civilisation, goodbye every culture that ever existed, hello absolute and utter chaos as the entire planet's population tries to squeeze into one little hole down there." He finishes his coffee. She ignores hers. 

"Now the Phoenix Foundation has been batting this problem around for a century, trying to weigh the value of a few people living longer over letting it be - because it's not as if people are unkillable down there, and I have no doubt that inventive new ways of death would be put to use almost immediately. Then, there's all the civilisations down there that would be obliterated by a stampede of six billion refugees. Unless they were powerful enough to obliterate us first. But the Foundation being the beacon of hope that it is, we've been debating the morality problems, making contingency plans, nuclear-war scenarios...and then it comes to light that the lead hitman for one of the most amoral organisation on the planet has plans for an alternative route to the Neath. One we'd never heard of before. I sent MacGyver to check it out and held my breath."

"And now?"

"Well, you've proven it from your own research. He's down there changing history! That's not something that anyone in the Foundation thinks he has the right to do!"

"That sounds like an argument for sending people down to help him out. Getting as much information as we can. Learning more, not shoving everything under the bed and pretending it doesn't exist!"

"Or an argument for leaving well enough alone, and hoping to hell that the best man I've ever known has what it takes to stop us all waking up in a nightmare," Pete says tiredly. "Besides which, the agent I sent down after him never came back either...this isn't even about morality or immorality any more, this is humanity's safety at stake. You don't know what happens when you change history, I don't know either. Maybe it starts off a chain reaction capable of obliterating the earth. Or the universe. We can't test any of this, and as a species, we're just not ready to cope with it. We may never be."

The days to come will all be like this, she realises: full of nutritious, well-meant platitudes that’ll be stuffed down her throat. Or maybe only hours. The Phoenix Foundation moves very quickly indeed, when it judges a risk to the Grand Sanction. 

Mac had warned her that she might have to use her tradecraft against the very people who'd taught it to her, one day. Optimist that he was, too. She wishes now she'd believed him. 

But he made it out of worse. Hell, so has she. 

Time to start running again. 


	5. from "Unseen Red Thread: The Life of the Honourable Geographer" (biography, 1979)

Socialite, explorer, zailor, author, and above all, cartographer, his influence shaped London's understanding of its new environs from Fall to Apotheosis. In the '60s, he helped chart the edge of the Elder Continent; in the '70s, the light-ship explorations took the bulk of his attentions; come the ‘80s and his brainchild, the Fleet of Truth, swept all before it....

...an early stint on one of the various expeditions searching for Sir John Franklin, during which the cruelty and disorganisation of the navy disgusted him to the point that he resigned shortly thereafter (he would later become one of the foremost advocates of Fallen London's Merchant Navy; certainly one of the first to celebrate the force in its own right, rather than as a makeshift substitute for a much-bewailed past.)

...always a considerable enthusiast for all things South American. At the time of the Fall, he had recently returned from a Peruvian expedition for collecting cinchona plants (evoking a nine-day's sensation, after the Fall; many a paper found the irony of his delivering the much sought source of quinine, exactly as immortality arrived, to be a much-needed piece of comic relief amongst more serious matters). He hesitated greatly over the offer of a Foreign Office appointment to the Tomb-Colonies. But duty called: he followed close upon the heels of the Carnelian Explorer, planting his reviled trees near the budding young colony (Elder Continent quinine would be one of the key ingredients in that quintessential London staple, the tincture of vigour...)

...proudest moment was the secretaryship of the Royal Geographical Society, the highest point of which came in 1888, when the Society obtained exclusive rights from the Empress for all future London expeditions (barring a few strictly monitored exemptions for the University-affiliated). The Fleet of Truth would find considerable opposition to its practices over the years, until the intervention of the Dilmun Club broke its monopoly once and for all, but the achievement nonetheless…

...his relationship with the (Martyred) Owner remains ambiguous. Certainly the Geographer pushed for his young protege to captain the Pale Wastes Expedition, with a fervour that even other members of the Society found a trifle extreme. But the Owner more than qualified on his merits as a genuine naval officer and trained torpedo expert, regardless of Storm…*

...ending his career much as it had begun, in an expedition North. The _Terra Nova’s_ crew was a mad, Colonist-ready group of disillusioned cartographers, heartsick at the co-opting of their birthright, the Underzee’s filled-in map, the _Discovery’s_ certain loss. They swore to find and aid their lost comrades, whatever price the voyage might demand. 

They were not seen again; and social London mourned. 

But perhaps the Geographer would have had better sympathy with one of his less orotund epitaphs, as spoken by one of Wolfstack's common zailors.

"It were the only thing."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Both qualities generally being held in great esteem for Northern explorers, though the Dilmun Club quietly put forth arguments that Whither-type flensing-weapons were of more use against lifebergs. This advice was, often, ignored by the typically patriotic London captain, keen to demonstrate the might of their fashionably modern technology...


	6. the irrigo archives

Up on the Surface- past the seven staircases, and the straitened passages of lead and cold-forged brass panelling, and the Warder of All-Eyes- it’s 1991. Up in Cambridge, there’s pips and clocks and timestamp, with a definite sense of place to centre the mind.

Down here, however frequently the Angler checks her watch, she’s never been sure that time runs that simply. It’s a bad habit, to fancy that her diligence is its own form of protection, but people do worse in here. That poor unfortunate who used to carve a notch in his skin for every level he descended, and could not would not stop- don’t think about that.

She forces her mind back to the subject at hand. Here in the Seeking section, cunningly hidden behind a skin-soft, oversized copy of “Obsidian Well”, she’d hidden a stack of fruit-and-nut bars. Someone’s swiped the lot. 

There isn’t exactly anyone she can complain to, she thinks, her mouth quirking. Whatever quasi-mystical attributes the Archives may or may not possess, at bottom it’s a library. There are strict rules about bringing in meat and drink. (Aside from concerns for pests and so forth, the authorities don’t want anyone to start living down here. As she surely would, were the opportunity granted…)

How annoying. And it’s probably just another student, who she’s cheered for the day with an unexpected windfall. Her watcher’s instinct is telling her: trust the simple explanation. 

Trust, but also verify. 

***************

“Did you ever actually see the Ghostflower?” she asks the Miscreant Dancer, later. 

“Of course! Soap-white skin, crow-dark hair set in sharp ringlets- I kid. She was an exceptionally lovely spectre. Insofar as I can judge, from my rather limited experience of spooks.“

“Thought you liked boys.”

“Beauty remains beauty. Besides, your comment is quite literally immaterial.”

She can’t help laughing at that. 

They’re relaxing in the Tasting Room, antechamber to the archives. Tasting, because it's the only room in England where one can enjoy a Khanate paperback or a Carnelian penny-dreadful, without all the rigmarole that accompanies a descent Below. Also because the building is a converted wine cellar and the old name's stuck. Coincidences have a way of perpetuating themselves in the Neath Studies department. 

It’s also a natural haunt for those few students intimated into London's secrets, which is what she's looking for tonight. 

“I don’t know about immaterial. Somebody definitely nicked a chocolate bar of mine down there.”

“Stuff and nonsense! You mean to suggest that our library’s Ghostflower, flitting through the dreams of countless Neath students, should have the temerity, the indecency to be so perfectly beastly? And corporeal?”

“I dunno, doesn’t it have a certain charm in its own way? One lost soul down in our holy of holies, sleeping under sheets of paper and nibbling the library paste. Why must everyone in our charmed circle always end up sounding so cod-Victorian, anyway?”

“Pets come to resemble their owners. Or owners the pets, I can’t recall which- and besides,” the Dancer says, fingering his book (“Silken bonds: socio-economical trends at Saviour’s Rock, 1860-1880”). “Everyone in this discipline- don’t we nurse our secret hopes? Of some unsought miracle, the which shall come transport us to our very earthly paradise?”

“It’s been a hundred years,” the Angler points out. “They must have moved on, just as we have.”

“Must they? I rather prefer the _Siculus_ hypothesis, that a society of immortals will perforce experience a certain degree of cultural inertia…no, in my book they still all wear top hats and swear by jove. Besides, in every way that matters they achieved a higher level of cultural sensitivity than we have. You quarrel with a man, you fight a duel and no harm’s done. You love a man, you take him down the aisle and the populace applauds you. Now, why can’t modern Cambridge be so civilised, I ask you?”

“I thought it was already. College town?”

“Well. Leicester, then.”

***************

The map of the archives, such as it is, is textual rather than pictoral. More suggestive than assertive. A few genuinely helpful hints- string is best to mark a trail, for some books crave chalk-mark decorations. I before E, except after zee. Contrariwise, some make no sense whatsoever (why, pray, should one wear gloves when drinking milk between the old and new moon?)

“Annotate this guide,” the text suggests. “The careful scholar will, in time, chart associative trails with far more ease if they consider themselves a participant, an explorer, not a slavish follower of directions…”

“This sounds a bit like the famous Underzee,” she says to one of the librarians. “No two captain’s maps ever agreed there, either.”

“You do know this building used to be the Surface entrance, for the Travertine Spiral? Even the Grand Sanction couldn’t wipe all traces of the irrigo leakage upwards. Rather a good thing, seeing as it protects our records from illegality.”

“In the sense of the Sanction, or in the sense of Judgement law?”

“My dear. In this context, they are one and the same.”

“It also sounds like a great way for you to duck questions about how to find anything.”

The Librarian merely smirks. 

***************

She buys a few bags of imported American chocolate bars from a specialty store, to use as ostentatious bait. It’s a foolproof plan. No British student in their right or wrong mind would eat that tasteless corn syrup pap, so she can be sure no one else will touch them. 

Not that she plans to eat them either; she just puts the wrappers around some genuinely good chocolate, and a few fungal energy bars (mushrooms are very popular in Britain; apparently they're a good source of Vitamin D). There’s a very deep, spiralling well down by Transports (Velocipedes), with a lid of pink-glazed marble, which she uses to dispose of the evidence. Objects dropped in there fail to make a satisfactory splash, but that’s the only downside. 

Over the next six months, it becomes a sort of pet project. Not as a serious matter- she has research to conduct and a thesis to write (the Nameless Doctor’s narrative, for all its terribly mystic and symbolic content, is starting to read as though it’s covering up for far starker, alarmingly straightforward truths). But it’s an easy way to keep herself amused in the dusky padded aisles. Like laying bread-crumbs, to find her way from book to book to book. 

She starts keeping a spreadsheet for plotting the disappearances. Looking for patterns, keeping her hand in. To see if anything turns up. The Ghostflower avoids politics, lingers by alcoholic liquors, has a special fascination with the nomenclature section. Every bit of food left by the Seeking shelves vanishes in haste. 

Maybe that’s only to be expected. 

***************

“It’s ludicrous,” she tells the Stoat-Loving Librarian. “The Doctor begins with the assumption that time travel is normal, and it’s baked into the narrative at such a basic level that you’re almost suckered in, just because he’s our point of reference and he takes it for granted.”

“But the chap’s a posy, isn’t he? We know that the Masters could be very generous towards their selected fatefuls. This whole business about what Hours actually do needs a good deal more looking into,” the Stoat-Lover says, rearranging her living muff about her more commodiously. Librarians are indulged with these little eccentricities. They have to work down here, after all. 

“If he was going through them for it, that’d be one thing, but I don’t think he is. Whatever his Cerise cataclysm involved- if anything, that’s the Masters working against him. But he seems unsurprised. Almost pleased, even, that they’ve finally tipped their hand. There’s a bit from one of the Nadir journals where he’s talking about…um, ‘the sigil for an oncoming storm’ was his translation. Don’t think that’s right. More like ‘the wailing of theoretical strings’. But he’s included the superscripts for past, and present, and future, in one huge bodged-together lump.“

“That sounds like quite the messy description.”

“It is. I’m starting to see why no one’s bothered writing up this text before.”

***************

The Angler rubs her eyes and looks at her charts again in disbelief. There’s a pattern all right. By taking the first letters of the various locations she’s left treats in, the disappearances map perfectly onto a standard English-language frequency analysis. The kind cryptographers use, for cracking codes. 

What does that even mean? Is it supposed to be some sort of message? An attempt to communicate? Can’t be. There are umpteen easier ways for anybody with this good a command of the language to talk to with her, if they felt like it. 

One thing’s for sure, she’s dealing with one heck of an erudite ghost. 

***************

Most of the Neath Studies students leave for the Christmas recess, even the ones who live quite far off; it’s rather encouraged, as a means to keep them all mindful of their Surface ties. But she’s an international, with nowhere to go back (home? Not home, surely). All they can do is ask her to put the work aside. She does, for a little while. 

December 25 dawns clear and cold, with not a hint of snow. She rises early to enjoy the ringing courses. Birds wheeling against the alien sky. A dawn-lit walk down to the Granta, which is running sluggishly but sure. 

This is not a bad place to be. Safe and satisfactory, and a small part of her wonders if she even has the right to be here. (Only a small part. California is long behind her, the Angler tells herself.) 

But it’s not what her heart longs for. Not her beloved, romantic, fabled London. London, of the charter’d streets, of fallen grace. Can one fall in love with a place one’s never been? 

How strange and inexplicable, her flavour of hiraeth. 

Her steps turn back towards the Tasting Room; it’ll be silent down there today. Even the librarians will be taking their day of respite. She’ll be able to slip in without anyone watching, bury herself in books, build walls of monographs, enamoured and immured of lore. 

The Angler heads down, through the protections and the rituals, moving swiftly through the labyrinth. One of those saucy books dealing with Veilgarden parties, perhaps? She’d never cared to examine those, for fear someone might catch her (gasp!), admiring pictures of Mr Veils’ ladies in their famous red stockings. The current theory about the stockings is a dye ground from some zee-creature's shell, like the sea urchins used to make Tyrian purple. No proof, yet. They’d need a sample to know for sure.

 _We really are all Victorians still,_ she reflects, then stops. Should have been the left turn there, shouldn’t it? Where is she? Khanate propaganda, First City writings, these places are all unfamiliar. 

Her lantern inexplicably flickers, in an errant gust (where did that come from? did she imagine a purple-streaked tinge to the wind?) It’s quiet down here, not a single living soul beneath to hear her cry, if she did (she will not cry, for heaven’s sake if she gained anything from her family it was learning not to cry-)

The candle-light goes out. She’s lost. She’s lost, she’s lost, she’s lost-

No. Here is her work-name, here is her given name. Here, curling about her wrists, not yet wiped away for all that she can’t see them. 

“I am the Sprightly Angler,” she says aloud, “and I am where I stand. And I will not be cowed!”

Maybe frightened, she thinks wryly, but not cowed. Not by books or breaths or funny lights. All the situation needs is a little logic. (A single memory of light: discussing syllogistic logic in a sunset-lit houseboat. The thought steadies her.)

Such as this: here is her electric torch. Here are her footsteps in the dust. The Angler follows them back, in perfect safety, to the familiar tomes of the Seeking section. All will be well. She could find her way back now with her eyes shut.

Not that she does. Fortunate, as otherwise she’d have tripped over the slight dusty thing here, lying motionless in the darkness. Soundlessly asleep. Clad in an ancient zailor’s smock, lovely as a wrought canticle. 

Her Ghostflower? At last?

The Angler kneels down, holding herself in stillness. To happen across her quarry now, not by any cunning stratagem or relentless hunt, shouldn’t she be disappointed?

No: no, she’s played fair with her hind, dreamed up traps but never used them. A sacred trust, hospitality more ancient than any ritual, love arising from patient kindness. How beautiful her charge is to her, though pale with sunlessness, and her lips cracked and hurt. 

Seeking, Seeking- oh, she must be thirsting. A fortnight of Christmas preparations on the Surface, and nothing for the lonely wanderer down here. The Angler checks through her bag, finds nothing. Except the flask of dark red Lacryma Christi. Expensive stuff, with which she’d intended to drink the three o’clock toast of absence. 

“Never mind. The best wine,” she murmurs, “that goeth down sweetly, causing the lips of those that are asleep-“

The Ghostflower wakes at the first taste. Avid and desirable in herself, she drinks with eager greed, splashing a drop of wine upon the breast of her smock. It stains pink, far paler than the Angler would have expected. 

“Thank you,” she says, once the drink is gone. 

“You’re welcome. Please- may I ask your name?”

“Ask away,” her Ghostflower says. “If you ever discover it, tell me as well.” 

Nothing more: her quarry rises, vanishes into the stacks with a fleet, skipping step she could never hope to follow. How can her Ghostflower navigate the dark volumes with such conceit? Scent, or some subtler instinct?

Questions, questions. Questions to ask later, catch and release for now. When she’s satisfied in mind as well as body, won her love in her ways, to be wise.

For the first time in her life, the Angler permits herself to skip a Christmas church service. 

Tasting the sacramental wine would be such the anti-climax. 

***************

A month passes. Blessed by anticipation, rude and solemn dreams.

She works as hard as ever. Her researches, her writings, are themselves another way to love. 

“I don’t think it was to do with Queen Victoria at all,” the Frivolous Onlooker observes one night (they have a family somewhere, and position, and a gender, all of which they are avoiding for as long as possible). “Or at least, she was only a means to an end. London simply had to fall, because too many threads were coming together, too much knowledge- you know I’m cataloguing the contents of Soane’s house museum. Original Piranesi drawings, of temples near Paestum. A second-city sarcophagus that he paid a fortune for. I’ll warrant that the man was coming near to some clear assessment of the Bazaar’s abilities when he died- but we can’t follow up, because all of it fell with London.”

“By that argument, Cambridge will be the Sixth City. Perhaps you’ll be able to stay on after all.”

They groan. “In a hundred and fifty years? Less? Not even the Third City took so little time. Ah- ‘the second betrayed, the third taught us hunger, the fourth we remade-‘“

“What under earth’s that?”

“Just one of the remembrance cycle, though it isn’t in the usual formation. Haven’t you ever heard it- no, you’re more the technical type, aren’t you. Like most good poetry, it’s a mnemonic. To keep the fallen cities straight.”

“Can’t say I ever had much use for those,” the Angler says with satisfaction. Nobody ever makes a Phoenix agent without a good memory. “Then again- that’s an idea! Those wretched Nadir journals that I’ve never been able to figure out, I wonder…”

“How so?”

“All this time, I’ve been assuming that my Doctor wrote down his name somewhere- I was sure he had, to get in and out of the Nadir so easily- but maybe that’s why I haven’t been able to figure it out, that was the wrong angle of approach. Maybe what he wrote down is a- a call, of sorts. Not the name itself, but a way to summon it!”

“Worth trying,” the Onlooker says heartily, meeting the Angler’s keen-eyed enthusiasm with equal pleasure. 

Wonderful thing, the integrity some students here put into their work. 

***************

“Magic doesn’t exist, because magic’s just a name people give to phenomena they don’t understand yet. Once they do understand it, it becomes science,” Mac had told her once. 

The practical, hard-nosed engineer she remains at heart agrees with him completely. 

So, in fact, does the Neath-besotted lover, which is why she’s practicing calligraphy with ruler and compass. This will be a test. A proper scientific test. 

The Sanction operates by firm rule of law; nothing Neathy to come above, nothing Surface to go below. But there’s a little wiggle room here in Cambridge, and if the Doctor’s journal is correct- if his odd language of squiggles and circles derives from another universe, operating on physical laws of far-removed origin- maybe, just maybe, it’ll work. The first British ritual in a century. She finishes the drawing with a stroke both eager and precise. 

Nothing happens. It’s just a piece of paper. 

A fat lot of good this is, the Angler thinks, blinking in haste. Even if all her assumptions were correct- which they probably aren’t- of course the Doctor would know how to speak his own language. She doesn’t. She has no idea of the enunciation whatsoever, and her otherwise very entertaining narrative is no guide on the matter. Just a few circles in circles, intermeshing like toothless gears- wait. 

Wait. Does she have to be the one to speak it, or will it say itself? Once she builds a device that will spin out this waiting blueprint. Encode the message in clock wheels and gears, as would be apt for a Time Lord. Of course. 

And she knows enough horology to at least make a stab at it, thanks to a certain mentor who dabbles in everything mechanical under the sun. 

The Angler mails an overnight package to Los Angeles that afternoon, with a card and a Whirring Contraption blueprint that might amuse him. A trifle belated for a present, but knowing Mac he’s probably celebrating his birthday in the field anyway. 

***************

Tick, tock, tick, tock.

“What’s your name?” the Angler asks, hands full of machinery and heart full of- love? Love. 

Without answering, her Ghostflower takes the name-craft. Traces her forefinger over each rounded gear of the frictionless casing. Her mouth curves to match, in a slow, withdrawn smile with more than a touch of cynicism to it. 

Something new here. No longer a fragile object defined by desire, but a woman, as certain of herself as anyone the Angler’s ever seen. 

Even more infatuating, now. She could say no. She might say yes. 

“Now then. Wouldn’t you agree, that’s a very personal question?”


	7. comments on the noble art of angling

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is not, in fact, mine, nor is it even fictional; the passages come from a book review in the June 1848 edition of Blackwood's: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/40099/40099-h/40099-h.htm#Page_673
> 
> (The original book is here: https://books.google.com/books?id=y90RAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA229&lpg=PA229)
> 
> In my defense, all I can say is that having once come across it in her studies, the Sprightly Angler would promptly have included it in her commonplace book.

Simply we shall say, that any body who so leisters fish from this day forward is a BRUTAL BARBARIAN, fit for the society of a Burke or a Hare, who did not venture to immolate their victims till gross physical corruption—the heavy prostration of drunkenness—rendered them in general the easy and stupid prey of a disgusting assassin. Let the leisterer of foul fish be accursed in the sporting calendar.

Under all circumstances, to be quite candid, we remonstrate against the leister. It is not a fair way of going to work—the fish has no option. There is too much of the tinge of the Venetian bravo in the blow. Less apology must there always be for striking a salmon than for striking a man behind his back. The man who detects the stealthy thrust may turn and smite his enemy. The fish, vigilant happily of the descending trident, can but shift its quarters and swim away. Basking, too, at the moment under the broad beam of the all-rejoicing sun—as motionless, as tranquil, as bright, and as beautiful, as the silver pebbles in the river's bed—why should idle human violence invade and extinguish that unsuspecting repose? At this very instant, while he is in such attitude and mood, fling, if you can, with delicate precision, over his snout the most attractive mottled wing in your book, and then—if the pensive Zoroaster of the stream quits his meditations to swallow your temptation—then hook him, play him, land him, and encreel him; but do not, without any warning, plunge a barbed steel fork into his heart. Or, at this very instant, let the seduction of the triple worm travel athwart his ruminations, and if the glutton shall overcome the sage, then, even in his voracious throat, strike home, and overcome the glutton; but do not hack the noble form with ruffianly prongs of rusty iron—

"Let's carve him as a dish fit for the gods,  
Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds."

Pr'ythee permit the leister, for the future, to decorate a museum along with other implements of the Cannibal, not the British islands!

*********

Now the angler is an individual who sallies out at early dawn, rejoicing, not only in his own strength, and, haply, the strength of a glass of whisky, but in a fishing-basket, or pannier, or bag; in a fishing-rod, or three or four fishing-rods; in a fishing-book, more voluminous in its single volume than the Encyclopædia Britannica; in wading boots and water-proof cloaklets; in a reel, and a gaff, and a landing net, and sometimes a boat; in gut, and in horse hair; in hooks and hackles; in feathers and silk thread; in wax and wire; in leads and floats; in tin boxes of worms, and earthen pots of salmon roe; in minnows, and parr-tails; in swivels and gorge-hooks; in lobs, and in bobs; in ferrules, and in rings; in a brown paper parcel of four large sandwiches, and a pocket flask of six large glasses of sherry; in a dingy coat, and inexpressible unmentionables; and finally, in the best humour, and a shocking bad hat.


End file.
